Various standards exist to ensure compatibility between communications devices made by various manufacturers. One such standard, known as Fibre Channel, describes a protocol for interconnecting communications devices through the use of various types of transmission media. This standard not only describes a protocol for various transmission data rates, but also for safety operations of laser diodes when the transmission medium is optical fiber.
Since it is difficult to ensure that an optical fiber media will be readily available for routing signals among communication devices, Fibre Channel allows for data transmissions, at a similar symbol rate, over copper wire, for a much shorter distance.
Circuit cards presently exist that implement certain aspects of Fibre Channel. Certain copper gigabit link modules (GLM), for instance, provide circuit cards that permit parallel-to-serial and serial-to-parallel conversion of encoded data that can be serially transmitted over a copper transmission medium at rates such as 1.0625 GBits/sec. Other circuit cards exist that provide an interface between an optical transmission medium and a copper transmission medium.
Despite the existence of such conventional circuit card devices, using such devices to implement various switching configurations is expensive and not as reliable as desired. Furthermore, these conventional circuit cards are designed for specific kinds of signal routing that cannot be configured through software control.